Deadline for Submission: January 15, 2007
Conference Location: Brandeis University
Conference Dates: February 15, 2008
   
Plenary speakers:
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Brandeis University
Second speaker, TBA
   
Innovative critical approaches sensitive to the body constantly reveal it as an occluded term at the center of many of our cultural, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. Our constructions of race, economy, law, desire, nationhood, textuality, and even language itself owe more to the body than their surfaces may readily acknowledge.
   
 "Fleshing out the Text," an interdisciplinary conference, seeks to probe the discourses embracing, resisting, and constituting bodies across a broad spectrum of historical, theoretical, and literary contexts. We invite papers that dismember, remember, and generally "flesh out" the body and its texts through critical interventions that open up and even operate upon them in provocative and unexpected ways.
   
The conference is open but not limited to original scholarship in the following areas:
   
Corporeal poetics
The textual corpus, the corpus as text
Historicizing the body
Trauma, wounds, and scars
Narratology and narrative
Illness, disease, harm, and healing
Disability studies
Science and technology
Post-rational revisions of the body
Skin, membranes, boundaries
Organicism
Medicine and the body
Gendered, sexed, and queer bodies
The post-colonial body
Raced bodies
The religious or mystical body
Performativity, theatricality
Dualism, monism, and other paradigms
Monstrous bodies
The body politic
The urban body
Spaces and architecture
   
Submissions are not limited on the basis of historical period or genre; we hope to have papers and panels that span an array of cultural, historical, theoretical, and disciplinary contexts.
   
Send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (350 words maximum) to bodyconference@brandeis.edu by January 15, 2007.  For more information, visit the conference website at http://people.brandeis.edu/~albin/bodyconference.

Deadline for Submission: April 15, 2007
Conference Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Conference Dates: October 4-6, 2007

INVITED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Viviana Zelizer (Princeton) and Rose Ann DeMoro ( California Nurses’ Association)

INVITED CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS: Eileen Boris (UCSB), Laura Briggs (Arizona), Amalia Cabezas (UCR), Grace Chang (UCSB), Dorothy Sue Cobble (Rutgers), Evelyn Nakano Glenn (UCB), Steven Gregory (Columbia), Maria Ibarra (SDSU), Jennifer Klein (Yale), Cameron Macdonald (Wisconsin), Premilla Nadasen (CUNY-Brooklyn), Rhacel Parreñas (UCD), Raka Ray (UCB), Ellen Reese (UCR), Becki Ross (British Columbia).

Hull Professor of Women’s Studies Eileen Boris of UCSB and Asian American Studies Professor Rhacel Parreñas of UC Davis invite single paper proposals from graduate students and junior faculty members that advance critical and innovative ways of thinking about how intimate labor could be a useful category of analysis for understanding not just current economic transformations and strategies for social change, but also for the social meanings of money and love; constructions of race, gender, and sexuality; and relations of power and authority in the global economy. We encourage diverse methods and approaches from the humanities as well as social sciences, including but not limited to ethnography, microhistory, political economy, critical race theory, and cultural studies. Papers will be “work shopped” in breakout sessions not only to provide an opportunity for graduate students and junior faculty to present their work but also to receive extensive comments from invited commentators and the assembled audience.

We hope this conference creates a venue for intellectual exchange and collaboration between junior and senior scholars to discuss care work, sex work, and domestic work around the themes of the political economy of intimate labor, globalization “from below” through intimate labor practices, work process and the culture of intimacy, and the politics of space and labor organizing. Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer, the author of The Purchase of Intimacy, will give the academic keynote on October 5 and we have invited Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the innovative California Nurses’ Association, for a kick-off keynote on October 4.

Funding (transportation and 2 nights in hotel shared accommodations) is available for conference participants connected to the UC system and partial funding may be available for other selected participants.

The conference organizers ask that all proposals be sent to Ellie Shermer (ellie@umail.ucsb.edu). Submissions should include a one-page abstract, one-page curriculum vitae, and a mailing address, phone, and email address.

Proposals are due April 15th, 2007. Decisions will be made and participants notified by May 15 th, 2007. Papers due September 1. They will be pre-circulated through the password protected conference webpage.